Daily Alaska...Dang it's cold edition

The Daily Alaska:

Okay, compared to a couple weeks ago, it's not that cold:

(Tangent alert...This thing is great. There's a unit outside so I can see how cold it is without having to step outside or near a window or open a door or anything. But it connects to some satellite and that's how it tells what time it is. Except that apparently they didn't think the Alaska Time Zone warranted inclusion. So mine is an hour fast, set to Pacific Time. Jerks.)


But the dogs were making me crazy. See, if it's way below cold, in the negative digits, they run out, poo and come right back in. When it's bright sunny and 19 degrees, they don't want to go outside and sit down, but it's warm enough that they want to go out and hang a little while, see if there are any neighbor dogs to bark at, watch for cars and trucks coming down the street, sniff the wind for moose. But they don't want to go out and sit down. They want to go out, do their stuff, smell and bark and make sure the world knows this is their territory, and then come back in to warm up for ten minutes.

Which means every few minutes I was letting them in or out. Or one in and one out.

And the house feels overheated today. It's hard to get the temperature right sometimes, especially with forced air heat. It feels way too hot in a lot of buildings, unpleasant. And I love fresh air, as opposed to air that has been conditioned or heated and funneled through dusty ducts and is full of indoor pollutants.

So I opened the back door.



Which is right next to my computer. Five feet behind me. (I almost wrote one less foot, but then I remembered Momisodes post about the Chinese New Year, and how you are not supposed to say that word...and BTW, happy New Year!)

The dogs loved it. They went out and barked at the cars and trucks driving down our street, then ran in to the front window to bark some more as they drive past the front of our house. Then they would get bored with that one and go back outside to wait for more trespassers.

Lucky for me, Target had these on clearance this past weekend:

Unfortunately these arm warmers didn't come with a matching pair of toe and ankle warmers.

I have closed the door again. Too cold. There is a window open in the living room, but just a crack because it's on the ground floor, and there is a window seat right in front of it. So I can easily imagine the dogs getting all worked up about some car driving past and going right out the window to confront it.

Other random stuff:

Went to Costco. Means king-size quantities of stuff we (maybe) can't live without:
dish soap, cookies, food my husband can make (the Thai Kitchen stuff), instant (and surprisingly good) mashed potatoes (I know. Instant mashed potatoes, yuck. But these taste buttery, they have a decent texture, and when I am pressed for time, they are a decent side dish or a good shortcut for making shepherd's pie), apples, grilled chicken strips, frozen egg rolls, mini sweet peppers, broccoli, spinach, cans of diced tomatoes, potatoes. I love Costco.

(The instant potatoes are in that gray carton behind the really good cookies. A whole big carton of goofy little mashed potatoes pellets.)
And these:

Stroop waffels. Caramel wafers. Completely delicious cookies from the Netherlands. The caramel gets all warm and gooey when you balance it on top of a hot cup of coffee. Just don't forget it or it falls in and you end up with a ucky sludge in the bottom of your cup. Very hard to find in the US. Actually, this photo sums up my Dutch experience pretty well -- Dutch, German, Belgian food plus Polish pottery. (The Belgians make the best frites in the world -- they should be called Belgian fries, not french. Ask Jientje, she will tell you. )

And finally, one of my favorite and most treasured things.



This is a little box my grandfather carved. Just a little box, with a little cat on top. I don't know how old it is, except way old. No real value, except to me and my family. It's one of the things that movers never ever get to touch -- along with useful stuff like dishes and bedding and clothes and books and computers and TV and video games -- you know, the stuff that makes living in a hotel or an empty house easier, there is a box of stuff like this that we drag along with us when we move. The important stuff.